Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve been reading Hellenistic Religions: The Age of Syncretism, edited by Frederick C. Grant and published in 1953. It’s a collection of primary sources from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia in 331 BCE until Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE, and then through the early Roman empire, which he calls the Hellenistic-Roman period. We tend to forget that Christianity is, then, also a Hellenistic religion, especially as Paul was a Hellenistic figure himself and the ultimate syncretist. 

Grant offers brief introductions to his categorizations of these sources and to the individual texts themselves. These are personal accounts of encounters with gods, instructions from a donor patron for the establishment and maintenance of a new shrine, accounts of and instructions on how to petition an oracle, and so on.

They reveal that pagans were having experiences and talking about the gods in ways that are quite similar to our own experience and language in some ways, and especially to those of their Christian contemporaries. Here’s an example, the account of a healing told by a man named Philadelphus by the god Asclepius written by Aelius Aristides, a Greek author and orator, 117–181 CE:

“This is what Philadelphus dreamed. ‘What happened to me was as follows: I dreamed that I stood in the entrance to the sanctuary, where also some other people were gathered, as at the time of the sacrifice for purification; they wore white garments and were otherwise festively garbed. Then I spoke about the god and named him, among other things, Distributor of Destiny, since he assigns to men their fate. The expression came to me out of my own personal experience. Then I told about the potion of wormwood, which had somehow been revealed to me [in a previous account in Aristides’s work cited by Grant]. The revelation was unquestionable, just as in a thousand other instances the epiphany of the god was felt with absolute certainty. You have a sense of contact with him, and are aware of his arrival in a state of mind intermediate between sleep and waking; you try to look up and are afraid to, lest before you see him he shall have vanished; you sharpen your ears and listen, half in dream and half awake; your hair stands up, tears of joy roll down, a proud kind of modesty fills your breast. How can anyone really describe this experience in words? If one belongs to the initiated, he will know about it and recognize it.’”

This account is so vivid, so personal. I have felt exactly like this myself. One can imagine Paul feeling like this in his visions, too. Or Jesus himself.

Aristides’s account goes on to describe how this wormwood treatment (wormwood is a poison) worked for Philadelphus, as did other odd cultic instructions later involving mud and running. One thinks of Jesus spitting into dirt and putting it on a blind man’s eyes.